January 24, 2008

In the ten months that I have served on the Massachusetts Public Health Council, no issue has been more contentious than “limited service clinics,” quickie drop-in offices offering treatment of minor illnesses that will be located primarily in pharmacies and staffed by nurse practitioners. The 15-member council, which is empowered to help shape health care policy in Massachusetts, has approved expensive new scanners, multi-million dollar outpatient buildings, and the creation of additional hospital beds with scarcely a whimper of protest. Many of these capital expenditures will predictably drive up health care costs in the state of Massachusetts, potentially threatening outlays for services essential to the health and well-being of the citizens of the Commonwealth. The benefit accruing from these capital investments is not subject to scrutiny.

The regulations that will permit the introduction of limited service clinics in Massachusetts, by contrast, provoked a storm of protest. Council members were deluged with petitions from interested parties—primarily physician groups arguing against this form of medical practice. The Council spent the better part of two of its monthly meetings debating the issue. But was the issue really the regulations—the Department of Public Health did an admirable job of developing detailed regulations that conformed to the proposed regulations developed by the American Academy of Family Physicians—or rather the belief of a variety of interest groups that mini-clinics are dangerous because they offer episodic care rather than coordinated care, they will be staffed by nurse practitioners rather than physicians, they will tend to be for-profit, and many will be located in drug stores, which sell cigarettes. Do any of these concerns hold up?

Nothing but the best… Ideally, if you live in Massachusetts, you have your own primary care physician. Not only that, but you have ready access to that physician—no week-long waits for an appointment, no 2-hour waits to be seen even if you have an appointment. In the best all of all worlds, if you are elderly and have multiple chronic illnesses, you have coordinated care, facilitated by a case manager (see R. Bernabei et al, “Randomised Trial of Impact of Model of Integrated Care and Case Management for Older People Living in Community,” British Medical Journal 1998; 316: 1348-1352). You also have health insurance coverage to pay for your visit to the physician. And if you happen not to be a resident, but merely visiting the state, you are able to find a primary care practice ready and willing to accommodate you if you happen to get sick while you’re here.

The reality is very different. Massachusetts has a shortage of primary care doctors. Generalists don’t want to move to the state, where salaries are below the national average and the cost of living is well above the national average. Despite the recent initiative to require health insurance for all residents, not everyone has coverage. “Coverage” may include substantial co-payments and deductibles. Thousands of patients throng to emergency rooms for care every day—where the wait to be seen is usually measured in hours, not minutes.

The fix for these problems is complex. And it’s not a problem that Massachusetts can solve alone—nation-wide, primary care is in a slump. The number of young physicians going into primary care is declining every year, and the reasons range from high student loans to fear of litigation, with a dozen other factors in between that adversely affect physicians’ willingness to practice general medicine.

Over the short term, limited service clinics can help. They provide an alternative way for patients to get treatment for straightforward problems such as sore throats and sprained ankles. They can administer flu shots and help tourists with a rash or a stomach bug. With suitable regulatory oversight, mini-clinics can improve the public’s health.

The NP/Physician Wars Physicians have been suspicious of the care provided by nurse practitioners for years. But the evidence is that in the arenas where NPs work, they often do at least as good a job as physicians. A study by Mary Mundinger et al (“Primary Care Outcomes in Patients Treated by Nurse Practitioners or Physicians: A Randomized Trial,” Journal of the American Medical Association 2000; 283: 59-68), found no differences in outcomes or satisfaction among over 3000 adults, some of whom received care from NPs and some from MDs—except in the case of management of high blood pressure, where NPs performed better. In data specifically on limited service clinics released as part of the Minnesota Health Care Quality Report, the NP-run clinics received a 100% rating for the treatment of sore throat in the pediatric population in 2006. When I randomly chose a not-for-profit clinic operating in the same Minnesota county to compare to Minute Clinic, I found it had a 72% rating on the sore throat treatment indicator (see mnhealthcare.org).

NPs always have MD back-up and supervision. It’s a condition of their licensure. But that doesn’t mean a doctor must be on the premises. NPs have been providing high quality care in nursing homes (where doctors often fear to tread) for years, as well as in hospices and in patients’ homes. There is no reason to worry they will misdiagnose or mistreat the routine ailments that will come to their attention in mini-clinics.

Big bad for-profit health care… Many health care institutions throughout the United States are for-profit. There are for-profit HMOs, for-profit hospitals, and for-profit physician group practices, among others. The data on the effect of for-profit status on the quality of care is mixed. A National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report comparing for-profit hospitals to not-for-profit hospitals found evidence that in some situations, for-profit hospitals are higher quality than not for profit hospitals (David Cutler, ed, The Changing Hospital Industry: Comparing Not-for-Profit and For-Profit Institutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). On the other hand, a study comparing health plans found for-profit plans performed less well than not-for-profit plans on 3 out of 4 quality indicators (EL Schneider et al, “Quality of Care in For-Profit and Not-for-Profit Health Plans Enrolling Medicare Beneficiaries,” American Journal of Medicine 2005; 118: 1392-1400).

For-profit health care is no stranger to Massachusetts. We have for-profit nursing homes. We have for-profit hospices. There is no justification for dismissing limited service clinics simply because many of them will be owned and operated by CVS.

It’s an outrage to have a health care clinic within a facility that sells cigarettes… Cigarettes are one of the leading causes of some of the major killers: coronary heart disease, emphysema, and lung cancer. Clearly, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health needs to be concerned with strategies to decrease cigarette smoking and to prevent young people from starting to smoke in the first place. But we do not ban the sale of cigarettes outright. We do not tax cigarettes enough to make them unaffordable to all but the very rich. And we do not prevent drug stores that sell prescription drugs for the treatment of coronary heart disease, emphysema, and lung cancer from also selling cigarettes. I fail to see why we should prevent those same drug stores from housing a health clinic.

The bottom line I hope that some day all patients in Massachusetts have access to top notch primary care. In particular, I hope that frail geriatric patients will have the kind of integrated care that I believe is best achieved through a case-managed, capitated health plan. In fact, I hope that there will be so little demand for mini-clinics that they disappear. But for the moment, I suspect they will provide a valuable service for many sick people in Massachusetts.

It is time for policy makers to pay at least as much attention to the rising cost of health care and its potentially dire consequences as to mini-clinics. Just this morning the Boston Globe reported that Governor Patrick has proposed a $28.2 billion budget that includes a 1.3 billion dollar budget gap, “created mainly by rising health care costs and decreased revenues.” The Congressional Budget Office recently released statistics indicating that barring any changes in policy, total spending on health care, which currently accounts for 16% of the Gross Domestic Project, will rise to 25% in 2025 and 37% in 2050. Federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid alone (net of beneficiaries’ premiums) is now 4% of GDP and will rise to 7% in 2025 and 12% in 2050 (see www.cbo.gov). Medicaid is a joint federal/state program: for every dollar spent by the federal government on Medicaid in Massachusetts, the state spends another dollar. And over the long run, as Medicare costs soar, the federal government will have less and less to spend on other programs that affect everyone, including Massachusetts residents.

The leading engine behind this unsustainable growth in spending is technology (See James Lubitz, “Health, Technology, and Medical Care Spending,” Health Affairs 2005; W5: R81-R85). While some forms of technology contribute much to health, others simply contribute to costs. Hospital beds, once built, will be used. But more is not always better. In a major study, Medicare enrollees living in high spending regions of the country received more care but did not have better health outcomes or greater satisfaction with their care (Elliott Fisher et al, “The Implications of Regional Variations in Medicare Spending: Health Outcomes and Satisfaction with Care,” Annals of Internal Medicine 2003; 138: 288-298).

The Public Health Council can do little more than rubber-stamp most of the requests it receives for substantial capital expansion. Massachusetts Determination of Need law does not permit the Public Health Council to do much other than review whether health care facilities submitting requests for substantial capital expenditures have engaged in the recommended planning process, whether they have developed the requisite community health services initiatives, and whether the proposed construction complies with existing standards. Ostensibly, the law is intended to “promote availability and accessibility of cost effective quality health care.” But the current statute promotes the evaluation of cost effectiveness without the ability to consider effectiveness. If Massachusetts is to have sound health policies, and if the PHC is to devote its time to the critical issues facing the state, the legislature will have to revamp the Determination of Need law of the Commonwealth.